By AFP
April 11, 2026
This handout picture released on April 7, 2026, by NASA shows crescent Earth setting along the Moon's limb, as seen from the Orion spacecraft on April 6, 2026 - Copyright NASA/AFP Handout
Maggy DONALDSON
When NASA flight director Zebulon Scoville was working a shift during the uncrewed Artemis I test flight, he realized the US space agency wasn’t consistently livestreaming the spacecraft’s journey to Earth.
“They said, well, we don’t have bandwidth, we’ve got to get all this vehicle and engineering data down,” Scoville recalled. “I was like — wrong.”
“This program will be over if people don’t buy it and they don’t come with us.”
NASA eventually got a low-bandwidth live stream up for that 2022 uncrewed mission.
And once it was over, senior officials named the NASA veteran “imagery czar” to boost engagement.
He told AFP he spent two years working across the agency to figure out how better to take the public on NASA’s new Moon missions.
That included adding an optical communications system onto the Orion spacecraft, a laser that transmitted to a ground station on Earth, sending streaming video in higher resolution.
Throughout the more than nine-day Artemis II crewed test flight — which ended Friday with an emotional splashdown off the California coast — NASA has maintained live programming on its own streaming platform and across social media.
That, combined with third-party streamers and broadcast news, has earned millions of views.
And as NASA official Lori Glaze said Friday: “To all of our new followers out there, please stay tuned.”
– NASA on Twitch –
From social media posts clipped from livestreamed events with the astronauts to an extraordinary portfolio of celestial photographs, viewers caught an eyeful of Artemis II.
Insitutions including museums held Artemis splashdown parties, and some teachers integrated the launch into their lessons.
Alex Roethler, a Wisconsin physics teacher, said watching the mission helped his students get “more engaged,” and made lessons “feel more real.”
“I love having the livestream available, and I also think it’s cool that they use Twitch,” Roethler said, referring to a video streamer site favored by gamers. “That is a platform more of our students use.”
The crew themselves have been integral to the storytelling.
During the nearly seven-hour lunar flyby, astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen and Reid Weisman gave near-literary descriptions of lunar surface features and left scientists in Houston awe-struck.
With Artemis II, there have been “just smiles and actually showing emotion through NASA, where we have sometimes had a history of being a little bit dry,” Scoville said.
“It’s okay to jump up and down and howl at the moon,” he added.
– Apollo-Artemis parallels –
Before Artemis II, the United States hadn’t sent astronauts around the Moon since 1972 for the Apollo 17 mission — the last of that famed space program that saw humans walk on the lunar surface.
In the lead-up to the 10-day test flight, NASA faced both a blase populace and a fractured media environment.
The space agency had to battle for attention across traditional and social media in a way the three-TV-channel era of Apollo never experienced. The Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969 saw approximately one-fifth of the global population tune in.
Yet for all the mythical qualities of Apollo, Jack Kiraly, director of government relations at the Planetary Society, said “nostalgia” perhaps “glosses over some of the issues that the program at the time faced.”
“Everything that led up to that was actually broadly unpopular with the American electorate, with the public writ large,” Kiraly told AFP.
Still, even with that in account, the analyst said “I don’t think this moment is living up to the hype” of most Apollo missions, and added he hopes NASA’s communications strategies continue to improve.
– ‘Longing for something good’ –
Ahead of Artemis II, Scoville had conversations with mission commander Reid Wiseman in which they reflected on parallels between the Apollo 8 lunar mission and this most recent Moon flyby.
The United States in 1968 was politically fractured and at war.
Nearly 60 years later, not so much has changed.
“We’re watching the news today, with wars, with division, and, like, how much everyone is just so longing for something good to happen,” Scoville said.
In a recent space-to-Earth press conference, Wiseman said their only news source during the mission was their families, who said Artemis has captivated people worldwide, though he admitted they are “biased.”
Wiseman said he hoped the trip could “have the world pause” to take in the beauty of our planet and universe.
“I think for the folks that decided to tune in — and it sounds like it was quite a few — this has happened,” he said.
Throughout their journey, all four astronauts emphasized how unified Earth looks from afar — a takeaway they hoped would permeate public consciousness.
“People are wanting to reach out to their inner rocket nerds,” Scoville said. “This is just a glimpse of what’s to come.”
After Artemis II, NASA looks to SpaceX, Blue Origin for Moon landings
By AFP
April 11, 2026
NASA official Lori Glaze says after Artemis II returns to Earth that 'all of industry' needs to work toward Moon landing - Copyright AFP RONALDO SCHEMIDT
Charlotte CAUSIT
With Artemis II successfully completing its historic lunar mission on Friday, NASA is banking on billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for the next step: landing astronauts on the Moon.
The Apollo program — which sent the first and only humans to the Moon’s surface between 1969 and 1972 — was designed so that only two astronauts could land on the lunar surface for a maximum of a few days.
More than 50 years later, American ambitions and expertise have grown, with NASA hoping to send four people on a mission lasting several weeks and eventually building a lunar base.
For the second phase of its mission, the space agency is looking to commercial landers designed by Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin to get its astronauts on the Moon.
After Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday after its record-breaking journey, NASA officials urged all hands on deck for a crewed landing in 2028.
“We need all of industry to work and come along with us, and they need to accept that challenge and come with us and really start the production lines that are going to be required in order to achieve that goal,” Lori Glaze, the acting associate NASA administrator, told a press conference.
The Apollo program relied on a single rocket, the Saturn V, which carried both the lunar lander and the capsule carrying the astronauts.
NASA has opted for two separate systems for Artemis: the first to launch the Orion spacecraft carrying the crew from Earth, and another to launch the lunar lander, which will be privately contracted.
– ‘Camping trip’ –
The decision was driven by the technical limitations of the Apollo program, Kent Chojnacki, a senior NASA official in charge of lunar lander development, told AFP.
“It was very not expandable to long-term exploration and long-term stays,” he explained.
Although spectacular, the Apollo missions were like “camping trips,” said Jack Kiraly, director of government relations at the Planetary Society, which encourages space exploration.
The systems NASA is looking at now are “huge compared to Apollo,” said Chojnacki, noting that the new lunar landers being developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX are two to seven times larger than before.
The space agency is also drawing from external partners, such as the European companies that built the propulsion module for Orion.
The new approach opens access to more equipment and resources, but also significantly complicates operations.
To send these giant spacecrafts to the Moon, the private space exploration companies will need to master in-flight refueling, a complex maneuver that has not yet been fully tested.
After the lunar lander is launched, additional rockets will be needed to deliver the fuel required for the journey to the Moon, some 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) from Earth.
– ‘Lose the Moon’ –
Given this risky undertaking and the numerous delays — particularly those experienced by SpaceX that was supposed to have its lander ready first — pressure has mounted in recent months.
“We are once again about to lose the Moon,” three former NASA officials warned in an article in SpaceNews last September.
China, which is hoping to send humans to the Moon by 2030, has been making progress as well, raising fears in the Trump administration that the United States could get left behind.
With that in mind, NASA raised the possibility last fall of reopening the contract awarded to SpaceX and using Blue Origin’s lunar lander first, sending shockwaves through the rival companies.
Both firms announced they were realigning their strategies to prioritize the lunar project — and keep their lucrative contracts with NASA.
But concerns remain, particularly regarding the feasibility of in-orbit refueling.
“We do have a plan,” Chojnacki said, noting that NASA has a back-up plan in case of failure.
The timeline is also up in the air.
NASA says it plans to test an in-orbit rendezvous between the spacecraft and one or two lunar landers in 2027, and carry out a crewed lunar landing in 2028.
Before that, companies will need to test in-orbit refueling and send an unmanned lunar lander to the Moon to demonstrate its safety.
That all needs to happen within the next two years.
“It feels like a very small amount of time,” said Clayton Swope of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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